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Altair Introduces Open Source and Free Basic Editions for Model-Based Development Offerings

TROY, Mich., Sept. 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Altair (Nasdaq: ALTR) announces the release and immediate availability of free Basic Editions of its Model-Based Development suite and its open matrix language (OML) source code. To help innovators everywhere accelerate the time-to-benefits from Model-Based Development (MBD) and to make MBD more open and accessible, Altair is taking the following steps:

Building upon its strong reputation of providing open-architecture simulation solutions by open-sourcing its computational programming language, OML. Interested users and contributors can download the source code from the OpenMatrix website.

Introducing Basic Editions of its MBD suite of software products – Altair Compose™, Altair Activate™, and Altair Embed™ – available to everybody at no cost, with free training videos available online via Altair’s open Learning Center. There are no license fees, nor any subscription or maintenance fees.

The necessity for Model-Based Development is increasing as today’s products and devices become increasingly complex with interconnected systems involving mechanical, electrical, and software components and sub-systems. However, adoption of MBD has been heavily constrained to-date by simulation software tools’ licensing and cost structures as well as proprietary formats.

“From the beginning, Altair’s MBD solutions have involved open standards like Python scripting, Modelica® modeling, and Functional Mock-up Interface (FMI),” said Brett Chouinard, President of Altair. “Altair is now open-sourcing its open matrix language – a high-level, matrix-based numerical computing language – to encourage interested scientists and engineers to expand the language, add toolboxes, and employ it for their math modeling and simulation tasks. Opening up our scripting language to the worldwide community will allow us and our community members to actively collaborative to keep up with the ever-increasing pace of technology changes.”

“Model-Based Development is a key enabler for the most innovative product development organizations. Altair’s bold move to lower the barrier-of-entry to usage and broaden the community has the potential to significantly disrupt the systems modeling and simulation market,” noted Don Tolle, Director of Simulation-Driven Systems Development Practice at CIMdata. “We are delighted to see Altair making its Model-Based Development technology accessible to more engineers around the world by open-sourcing their open matrix language and by making Basic Editions of their software products available at no cost,” added Professor Giancarlo Genta, Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Politecnico di Torino.

These highly capable Basic Editions have no limitations with respect to model size and are available to everybody – including students, course instructors, researchers, hobbyists, makers, and engineers in industry. For example, the Basic Edition of Altair Compose enables access to the entire open matrix language, including bridges to Python, using the easy-to-use Compose Integrated Development Environment (IDE). More advanced features and professional support are available via Professional Editions, which extend the Basic Edition capabilities by enabling access to the valuable Altair HyperWorks™ CAE Readers – making it easier to post-process, visualize, and perform mathematical operations on data from CAE or physical tests.